Is oat milk really ‘divisive’?

The Cenotaph was called contentious in a secret Metropolitan Police report, exposed by Policy Exchange, on memorials that were open to attack for their links to war, imperialism or slavery. In reality, of course, the Cenotaph brings the nation together each Remembrance Sunday to honour our dead.

In the same way, people are called divisive when others loudly take issue with something they say. J.K. Rowling’s ‘views on gender have proved divisive’, said someone in the Daily Mail, as though the plain truth that there are such things as women were controversial, rather than her opponents’ dogma that one may change gender by declaration.

The trouble at the moment is that divisive has a pejorative flavour but can be slapped on to people or opinions perfectly innocent in themselves. Iago was divisive by intent; Churchill united. Yet Churchill’s statue is among those listed by the police as contentious on the grounds that he ‘referred to Indians as “a beastly people with a beastly religion”’.

It’s not that Churchill habitually referred to Indians in that way, or perhaps ever. His remark was retailed by Leo Amery, the secretary of state for India, and was supposed to have been the wartime prime minister’s exasperated response in private to Gandhi’s Quit India campaign aiding Japan’s chances to advance through Burma.

Today, divisive is used without discrimination. It might indicate the preaching of hatred (a hate crime) or it might simply label a thing about which tastes vary (oat milk, Marmite). ‘Eating horse meat is divisive in French society,’ said someone in the Daily Telegraph. But it’s not that the French hold horse-eating rallies in sports stadiums.

The watering down of divisive was taken to its weakest strength in two references that my husband found in the motoring columns of the Daily Telegraph: ‘the Cavalier range outsold Ford’s divisive Sierra’ and the realisation that if you buy a BMW i4, ‘you have to live with that divisive grille’.